Episode Details

It’s ICECO Month, and they brought in the right guy for it. David from ICECO says that after COVID changed everything. Like a lot of people, he went outside, went wheeling, and ended up pivoting his whole career around it. Now he’s working with a brand that started in OEM refrigeration — manufacturing the internals that go inside other companies’ products — before expanding into the outdoor and overlanding space. That OEM history matters because it’s where the technology comes from. ICECO runs SECOP compressors, which articulate up to 40 degrees without throwing an error — something Jimmy can personally relate to after loading a competitor’s fridge into his truck and watching it fault out.

The conversation goes well past compressor specs. David and Tyler get into the framing that stuck with Jimmy most by the end: a fridge isn’t a recreational product that you also use at home — it’s a lifestyle tool that you bring with you. Jimmy’s been using a small fridge for grocery runs with his wife. She loads the car fridge first, doesn’t have to make the store her last stop, and comes home when she feels like it. That’s not overlanding. That’s just Tuesday. And it opened up a whole line of thinking about how the technology is circling back to everyday life after coming through the outdoor market.

From there the episode covers some of the new product stuff: the refrigerated backpack (cold drinks on a day hike — the gap between “car camp” and “pack everything in”), the VL45 Plus front-opening drawer fridge that launched on Kickstarter June 10th (Tyler’s take: this solves the “I have to keep the whole back seat clear to open the lid” problem), and the ICECO x PRP collab coolers. David also teases some upcoming product lines he can’t fully get into — racing cooling systems among them, including what sounds like a wearable air conditioning system for fire suits. Tyler’s response: he wants a refrigerator fanny pack for one beer.

ICECO has graciously given us a discount for all podcast listeners to use to get 12% off sitewide with code, SNAILTRAIL

ICECO
ICECO Website: https://bit.ly/4uB2qWY
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/icecofreezer/?hl=en VL45PLUS
Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iceco/iceco-vl45-plus-the-first-3-way-access-portable-freezer?ref=eoelyj

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